Approvals management production-rule engine

Abstract

Methods and apparatus for processing of transactions within an approvals management system that utilizes production rules stored in a relational database are disclosed. According to one aspect of the present invention, a management approval system includes a database and an engine. The database is arranged to store a set of production rules, and the engine is arranged to receive data and to utilize the data to process the set of production rules. The data includes a plurality of conditions having associated counters, and the engine is arranged to sort the plurality of conditions using the associated counters into an order and to evaluate the plurality of conditions based on the order.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of Invention [0002] The present invention relates to database systems. More specifically, the invention relates to an approvals management system which utilizes an efficient production-rule engine. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] Approvals management systems are often used to process transactions such as business transactions. Most approvals management systems include production rules which are generally of an “if-then” format. By way of example, a production rule may specify that if a certain condition is true, then a particular action should occur. Production rules may be stored in a variety of different data storage mechanisms which include, but are not limited to, databases such as relational databases. A production-rules engine, which is included in an approvals management system, generally receives a data input which satisfies conditions associated with rules, then evaluates production rules based on the conditions in...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0016] An approvals management system which uses a production rules engine to sort conditions such that most used conditions are evaluated first and then uses the evaluated conditions to eliminate production rules from having to be evaluated allows an overall approvals process to operate efficiently. The most used conditions are generally associated with the most production rules. As a result, when such conditions evaluate as being false, the production rules which utilize such conditions may be eliminated in an efficient manner. By eliminating production rules from having to be evaluated when they are effectively irrelevant, the time associated with an approvals process may be substantially minimized.

[0017] To further increase the efficiency with which an approvals process may occur, approval requests may be sent in parallel to various approvers. The use of N-tuples to effectively non-uniquely identify approvers allows approvers to be sorted in such a way as to enable a transaction approvals request to be sent to more than one approver at the same time, i.e., a transaction approvals request may be sent to two approvers which are assigned the same non-unique N-tuple substantially simultaneously. An N-tuple is an ordered set characters that is ‘N’ characters long. In addition, allowing for a single transaction such as an expense report to have multiple associated approver lists, e.g., an approver list for each subset of line items of the transaction, further enables an approvals process to be parallelized such that more than one approver may be processing a transaction approvals request associated with the transaction at any given time.

Problems solved by technology

While evaluating all rules associated with a set of data one-at-a-time in a nondeterministic order is effective in allowing approver lists to be generated, evaluating rules associated with a set of data in such a manner may often be time-consuming.

As a result, the execution of an approvals management production-rule engine or, more generally, an overall approvals management process may be relatively inefficient.

The process of obtaining approvals based on the approver list is also typically time consuming, as approvals are processed in a serial manner.

The serial approval of expense report 302 by approvers 306a-d may often be time-consuming and, hence, inefficient.

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